Good Luck Distinguishing Between Good Oligarchs and Bad Oligarchs

For Kat Taylor, who is married to the billionaire Tom Steyer, there is “the private empire,” and there is the Earth. As she explained in an eye-opening article by Jim Rutenberg in this Sunday’s New York Times magazine, the private empire is the dark world of the Kochs and other right-wing oligarchs, who are spending large fortunes on this year’s midterms to elect candidates to serve their personal and business interests.

And then there is the Earth, which is everyone’s, and so it’s perfectly O.K. for her husband to spend as much as $50 million to elect candidates who care about the environment and want to reduce carbon emissions and slow down climate change. It’s a lovely, self-justifying fantasy, but it’s a classic example of good ends justifying very bad means, and it’s wrong.
As the magazine article demonstrates, billionaire oligarchs have essentially become their own political parties. They can bypass the party systems and build their own political infrastructure, paying for phone banks, get-out-the-vote efforts, data mining, polls and the inevitable barrage of attack ads and mailings. Michael Bloomberg is doing it for gun-control candidates; Joe Ricketts for spending-cutters; Paul Singer for pro-Israel Republicans; and Mark Zuckerberg for an immigration overhaul.

Business interests had already dominated independent spending since it began, thanks to the Kochs and Karl Rove and the Chamber of Commerce and this year unions and other forces on the left have fought to keep up.

The courts have granted billionaires an enormous megaphone, and they are using it with gathering force. They can choose to push any issue they like, whether for reasons of profit or altruism, and the country will be forced to sit back and watch.

And it’s often hard for voters to distinguish between private and public empires, or to see through an apparently admirable message to a hidden commercial motive. In 2000, a group calling itself Republicans for Clean Air ran a TV ad falsely depicting Senator John McCain as opposed to renewable energy incentives. The group was actually backed by two Texas billionaires whose company was seeking government contracts for alternative energy production.

When the richest Americans control the agenda, their interests, whatever they might be, prevail over all others. Whatever Mr. Steyer believes — and he appears to be quite sincere — his opinion should not be amplified solely by virtue of his riches. A good idea should rise or fall on its own merits — as an ingredient in a big, democratic soup, alongside others that may come from less gilded backgrounds.

That’s considered laughably naïve in a world where the Kochs and other industrial interests will always bully their way to the front of the line. Since that’s how they do business, Mr. Steyer reasons, he has to operate “in the real world, the way the real world works.” And if democracy gets trampled along the way, it’s so easy to say: well, they started it.